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Comment by kingcharles | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to register this too in 1994. I guess it was a race between several of us to register stupid domains. I was also bending their ears to get them to let me register the remaining single-character dotcoms. It is heartwarming to see the Internic form on that page - you used to type up the text file and email it to them and wait. You could have pretty much any domain you wanted in 1994. Except fuck.com. Also, they were FREE. I lost all mine once they introduced the $200/year registration fee, after, I believe, Unilever sent them 19,000 registration requests for each of their trademarks.

Despite domains being free, most of the web sites I would visit were simply hosted on IPs. I had a big notebook next to my PC with all the IPs written down. That was my DNS in 1994.

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Amazing how quickly it transitioned to a more mainstream web. We had internet at home in 1995-96 and I registered my first domain in 1997 - by that time domains and DNS worked pretty much like today.

> by that time domains and DNS worked pretty much like today.

And by then it was too late. It was already broken beyond repair.

In a way, one of the more prescient things I have done in my life was to register the .org for my surname in 1999. I wasn't the first, but my timing was good. I do use it, so it's not just sitting idle.

I registered "steve.org.uk" in April 1999. steve.com and steve.org were registered in 1995, and 1997 respectively. So I guess I was very slow!

Happily after moving from the UK to Finland I did manage to grab steve.fi, which had expired within the first year of my relocation.

> I had a big notebook next to my PC with all the IPs written down.

Likewise! It was like having a secret code, or treasure map, and this data was much coveted among local young hackers.

There weren't many web sites, so I'll be honest, it was mostly IPs for ftp sites with upload directories that had accidentally been left open and were now filled with warez.

I'm a bit too young to remember the advent of the Internet but old enough to remember when the FXP scene burst onto BBS's with enough warez to fill every hard drive I could get my hands on.

hard drive? you mean diskettes, ZIP drives, and SYQUEST cartridges

the tape drives... 250+ MB years before iomega came along

Iomega Zip drives— still impressed with the choice of making the drives blue. The showstopper though, was my dad’s wood modem—I don’t remember if it was plastic or real, but it was purchased from a national retailer—not homemade and way cooler than the slate of white 56k US Robotics modems that followed!

why write them out longhand, you were just using ftp at a shell? I remember gui clients in that era that would store them. cuteftp on windows at some point mid 90s, and before that something else, maybe ws_ftp.

I’m not op but I have a very funny, related story.

In the nineties, my parents occasionally logged into my computer and stared at it for 15-20 minutes before going upstairs and turning on the television. Saving numbers in the computer box meant that I was breaking into the CIA and selling secrets to the Russians (while fornicating). Writing the same things down in a notebook was okay.

As soon as those client came along, I mostly switched. I don't remember any GUI clients in 1994.

One issue was that the GUI clients failed at most of the warez folders because they contained so many special characters - lot of things like ^H^H^H^H^Hwarez etc.

My experience predates the existence of cuteftp.

I was using gopher and telnet before Windows 3.1; I remember when HTTP arrived and ruined everything.

It's like having the phone numbers of different BBS to dial into back in the day. Except, the internet was always connected - which totally blew my mind!

an ol' buddy of mine has always claimed to have owned apple.com back in those days but he said they just took it from him one day. He would have been pretty young then, like 10 (and, yeah, that sounds right for him). Maybe he lost it because they started charging! haha.

A former colleague (who I don't know personally, but I worked with people who did) owned sex.com for a while. Even if the stories I've heard about what it was like to own that domain were exaggerated, it was pretty insane the lengths that people would go to in order to get a domain. Basically another gold rush, but with marginally less violence against those who squatted a claim.

sex.com was registered really early on. I remember registering 5ex.com in the mid90s as a runner-up prize.

Funny enough, dotcoms weren't as prized in the early 90s as they are now. All the c00l kids on the Internet had dotnets, so my first domain registration was eschaton.net.

Nowadays website using IP without https are blocked behind a red wall by main stream browsers

Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a plain IP used with HTTPS.

Here's one example that came to mind: https://1.1.1.1/

OF COURSE

Haha, thanks!

I want to return

I registered my UUCP node prior to 1994, so there :P...

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